Delusion Road (31 page)

“So he was warning us.”

Keegan nodded. “And explaining why he gave Wynn another chance. He’s worried what the guy might do if he has nothing to lose. At least the threat of getting kicked off his teams gives him something to think about.”

“Why hasn’t Richardson just gone to the VP about this?”

“About a feeling?”

“Yeah,” she acknowledged. “It sounds crazy when you say it like that.”

“Richardson felt bad talking about another student, but he couldn’t take the chance of saying nothing in case his hunch turned out to be right.”

Willa sighed. “I just wish we could get Bailey to go to the police. Everybody needs to know what that guy’s capable of.”

Keegan drew her close. “Right now,” he said, his tone lighter, and she could tell he was trying to cheer her up, “what’s important is what
I’m
capable of.”

She smiled up at him. “You sure you’re up for this?”

He raised his eyebrows in mock offense. “Willa Jaffrey, are you questioning my considerable prowess?”

“Considerable?” she echoed. “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”

He leaned toward her, his forehead touching hers. “Prepare to be overwhelmed.”

She was. The assignment Shedrand had given them that morning would have taken Willa a lot longer to do by herself. She was confident in her own math ability, but Keegan had a way of thinking outside the box that opened up some of the problems a lot faster than if she’d been working on them alone. They finished in under an hour, a record for the homework Shedrand had been giving them lately.

“You want to stay for dinner?” she asked as they packed up
their books. They’d worked in her room, using her laptop to access some of the math help sites she’d bookmarked.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I missed having dinner with Isaac last night. I think I should spend some time with him this afternoon.”

Willa was moved once more by the bond Keegan shared with his younger brother. “No worries,” she said. “Another day. Then you can meet my mom.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

Willa pushed away from her desk and stood. “I’ll drive you home. I’ll just be a minute, okay?”

She was, of course, longer than a minute. Several, in fact, after seeing in her ensuite mirror the wreck her makeup had become following their moments in the SUV after school. When she finally emerged from her bathroom, she found Keegan sitting at her desk, closing her laptop. “Anything interesting?” she asked.

He reached for his backpack on the floor. “Just checking to see if the weather’s going to break.”

Something about the moment didn’t feel right to her, although she couldn’t have explained why. She pushed the thought aside, chiding herself for her overactive imagination. After all she’d been through with Wynn, she was gun-shy, expecting trouble where there was none.

Later, though, after she’d gotten back to the house, taken a swim, and called her mother, who was in the middle of a spa treatment with Rachel that involved seaweed, she returned to her bedroom to finish her other homework. As she stood in the doorway, the memory of that moment came back to her, and she suddenly knew what had bothered her about it. He hadn’t looked at her when he said he’d checked the weather.

She tried to shrug off her suspicion, but it nagged at her the whole time she was reading the last two chapters of
The Mountain and the Valley.
When she finally put the book down, she glanced over at her laptop and scowled. Moving to her desk, she lifted the screen and the processor woke up. She stared at the desktop image, a photo of the bay she’d taken in August from the deck of their cottage, and she remembered Keegan standing there yesterday. And then later inside the cottage, the silver flecks in his eyes blazing with firelight. She closed the laptop and reached for her history homework.

But he hadn’t told her if the weather was going to break, had he?

I’m not
—

She turned back to the laptop.

—who you
—

Her fingers traced the computer’s logo as she cursed her suspicion.

—think I am.

She raised the screen again and touched her browser icon. Opening the Internet Options tab, she scrolled down to History. There was none.

It had been deleted.

G
riff unlocked the door of the motel room, finding it nicer than he’d expected. An hour ago, he’d pulled off the highway and driven through a community called New Minas looking to buy some equipment he’d need and then decided to spend the night there. Brookdale was only a short drive from New Minas, and he thought it safer not to stay in the town where he would carry out the hit. People had a tendency to remember you more clearly if you overnighted in a place.

Besides the bag of items in his left hand—most of them were electronic, but there were some old-school tools in there, too—he carried in his right a bag containing two Big Mac combos. Rather than eating at a restaurant, where someone might recall seeing him, he’d decided on takeout, and McDonald’s was the first drive-thru he’d seen. Besides, he was interested to see if takeout from the Golden Arches in New Minas tasted anything like McDonald’s in Chicago.

After he’d eaten—and damn if the stuff hadn’t tasted exactly the same—he took a long shower. Towelling himself off afterwards, he could hear his phone pinging—the signal that someone had accessed Talia’s Facebook page, someone who had
never viewed her profile before. Not that this meant anything. Complete strangers checked out other complete strangers all the time. But Griff had long since learned to trust electronics more than people, and he pulled his laptop out of its case, powered it up, activated the retinal scan, then logged on to the motel’s free Wi-Fi.

A few minutes later, having tracked the IP of the computer that had triggered the pinging, he could barely contain his excitement. Reaching for his phone, he entered the street address into his GPS, then lay back on the bed. He’d heard somewhere that bedspreads in hotel rooms contained more germs than toilet seats, and here he was lying naked on one of those cloth cesspools. But Griff wasn’t the one living dangerously tonight. That person was viewing Talia Lombardi’s Facebook page on a computer in Brookdale.

Hadn’t he said it over and over again? Sooner or later, everybody fucked up.

K
eegan saw the number on his cell’s display beside the low-battery icon but ignored it. He would call Willa back later. Right now, he was reeling from the news his father had just delivered. “I’m not moving,” he said. “Not again.”

Evan’s mouth was a thin line. “I’m their accountant, remember? I’ve just gone over the last of the books. It’s only a matter of time before the dealership goes under.”

“Willa’s dad is working on that. He—”

“Would need a miracle,” finished Evan. “And in case you haven’t noticed, times are nearly as tough here as they were back home. I have to think about
us
, which is why I’m calling Forbes to arrange something. It’ll look less suspicious if I tell everyone I got offered another job. Judging from those books, the rest of the staff will be looking for work soon, too.”

Keegan glanced toward the living room, where he and Isaac had been working on a puzzle together. He didn’t want to lose his temper like last night. Isaac had stimmed for over an hour after that. “I’m not moving,” Keegan repeated, his voice as even as he could make it.

“That’s not your decision.”

“Right. You’re the only one in this family who gets to make those. And we all know how great that’s been working for us.”

“Son, if I had it to do all over again—”

“Don’t you goddamn
dare
!” Keegan fumed, trying to keep his voice down. “You don’t get to talk to me about do-overs.
Ever
!”

His father looked away, and Keegan could see his words had hit home. A moment passed before he turned back. “I accept that you don’t care what happens to me. I even understand it. But are you willing to risk Isaac’s life, too?”

“I’m not risking anyone’s life. I’m trying to
have
one. Is that so wrong?”

“Of course it’s not wrong. But it’s not possible here.”

And that was it. To hell with what anybody else wanted. Or needed.

Keegan felt his fingernails dig into the flesh of his palms, felt his pulse throb in his ears, felt curses pile up in his chest like cars bottlenecking a lane. And then he thought of Isaac.

He turned and pushed out through the kitchen door and down the step. He was running before he reached the street.

W
hat were the chances? thought Griff, watching the girl pull out of the driveway and accelerate past him. A fucking blond. Sitting in the Charger, parked down the street from the address he’d traced the night before, he felt his skin crawl and tried not to think of it as another omen. A bad one this time.

Judging from the house she’d just left, Griff was pretty sure the target didn’t live there. He’d have been crazy to put himself up in something so flashy. Then again, Griff was sitting in a cherry-red Charger with sound-enhancing muffler, wasn’t he?

A man in a suit had driven off a few minutes earlier, and Griff had identified him from online photos as Carleton Jaffrey, the girl’s father, who owned a GM dealership on Commercial Street. Which explained the SUV the girl was driving now. A bitch like that you’d expect to see in something like a Camaro.

Seeing her drive off, he resisted the temptation to follow her, deciding to watch the house a little longer just in case the target surprised him and appeared after all. Several minutes later, Griff had detected no one else, neither outside nor within—the windows in the place were so large that, had anyone been inside, he was certain he’d have seen them moving around.
Only the two of them living in that huge house? he thought. He momentarily wondered where Jaffrey’s wife was but, having seen photos of her online, too, he could guess. Another blond. The bitch had probably divorced him and was making somebody else’s life miserable now.

Despite his near-certainty that the target wasn’t inside, Griff knew he couldn’t leave without being absolutely sure. Turning off the ignition, he reached for the bag on the seat beside him and got out. From the look of the place, Jaffrey was probably paying an arm and a leg for his security and monitoring systems. Too bad none of them were worth shit.

Thirty minutes later, having been over every inch of the place, Griff was confident that, not only was the target not in the house, he didn’t live there. Which meant only one thing: his older son had used the blond’s computer to access Talia’s profile. So he and the girl must be friends. Mind you, that relationship might not be present-tense, given the stuff his FRA had found on Facebook, but Griff was confident his theory was solid. The girl was the key to finding the whole family.

Standing at the rear entry and grateful for the high fence around the pool that blocked the neighbours’ views of the backyard, Griff reset the alarm and closed the door behind him. Coming around the side of the garage, he peered over the gate to see if anyone was on the street, but he saw no one. People who
lived in neighbourhoods like this were either already at work or still in bed.

His hands moist inside his plastic gloves, he walked nonchalantly toward the Charger and got in, turning on the engine and air conditioning once more. Gripping the wheel, Griff thought again about the Jaffrey girl, wondering how he could get the target’s address from her. He had no time to do his usual planning, work out all the angles, anticipate every scenario. Not if he wanted to see Talia soon. There was only one way.

He slid the gearshift into drive.

K
eegan looked like crap, and the question Willa wanted to ask him
—Where were you last night?
—suddenly didn’t seem as important as the state he was in right now. She’d thought about driving to his house that morning to pick him up but, since she hadn’t heard from him, she’d waited for him in the student parking lot. Sitting in the SUV beside her now, he looked very different from the confident guy who’d stared down Wynn d’Entremont the day before. He looked worried. Agitated, in fact. And were those the same clothes he’d been wearing yesterday? “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head. “My dad and me. Difference of opinion.” He reached across the console to take her hand. “Sorry I didn’t call you last night. My battery died.”

Not exactly the excuse she’d been hoping for. Weren’t there other phones in his house?

As if reading her mind, he added, “I wasn’t home last night. I was afraid I’d blow up and send Isaac over the deep end.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Memorial Park. Slept on a bench.”

She reached up and stroked his cheek, the stubble on his face rasping her fingers. “You could have come to my place,” she said.

“Trust me, I wouldn’t have been good company.”

Trust me.
She wanted to, but there was still that thing with her laptop. She’d checked her Internet Options again to see if maybe she’d inadvertently changed a setting, possibly checking the “Delete browsing history on exit” box. But she hadn’t. There was no question: Keegan had used her computer to access the Internet and then erased his tracks afterwards. But why? There could be any number of reasons, the most obvious being porn, but he really didn’t seem the type. Of course, Wynn d’Entremont didn’t seem like the type who’d get off on assaulting girls, either. But something—she wasn’t sure what—told her that Keegan hadn’t been surfing X-rated sites. He’d been looking at something else. Something he didn’t want Willa to see.

She’d planned to confront him about it as soon as she saw him, but she knew now wasn’t the time. And, deep down, she was hoping he’d tell her without her having to ask.

Trust me.

Okay, she’d give him some time.

But she wasn’t going to wait long. Wynn had made a fool of her for months. She wasn’t about to let that happen again.